Monday, March 28, 2016

In Australia, we have a great, albeit complicated-in-the-back-end, system for electing senators. Not only is it proportional so that smaller parties can get represented, but it's preferential, so people aren't pushed towards 2-3 parties due to a fear of wasting their vote.

In practice, almost every person just votes for a single party, and the party's own preferences for how that vote should be distributed are followed. This is called a Group Voting Ticket, or GVT. The effort of a person specifying all their own preferences, or even learning about more than a couple of different parties' policies, is enough to deter about 96% of the population from numbering every box for every candidate, which often reaches about 200 in total, which until recently, was the only alternative to following a party's GVT.

One area where there has been a lot of argument is that the way GVTs were being created wasn't fair, because they allowed parties to agree how to game the system by preference sharing in a way that was technically visible to voters, but invisible in practice, creating strange bedfellows. This allowed election of senators with sub-1% of the first preference votes to win seats after preference distribution.

Lack of transparency is an issue, but I have no problem with preferential voting systems allowing the election of people who would not have been foreseen in a non-preferential system. That's what preferences are for, after all: electing consensus candidates, rather than extremists who win a non-preferential plurality.

So, a reform that's just been made, specifically designed to exclude many minor parties from doing what was done in the last election - winning seats against the odds - has been enacted. (The government says the problem is that those who were elected in this way are not representative of Australia, but looking at the individual senators makes it clear they are far more representative of Australia than the major parties' senators.) The reform sounds reasonable, being that a person can preferentially number party boxes - as many as they'd like to express their preferences - instead of one party box or all candidate boxes.

The problem with this reform, however, is that it throws the baby out with the bathwater: some parties, specifically Pirate Party Australia in my experience, use preference deals with other parties in an open, transparent and honest way, and those parties will now be penalised by the unaddressed problem with this reform: most people still don't know enough about all the political parties, or care enough about how the system works, to vote for more than a few pairs at the top of their mind. Preferences will now be left unspecified, even where they would have clearly aligned with a voter's honest preferences.

I appreciate that the Australian Greens have said that they have had this reform as their policy for 12 years, so there should be no surprise to anybody, but the public debate was non-existent, and most people would have no clue about some old Greens policy that has had very little airtime over the intervening years. There was no Australian Law Reform Commission request for opinions, followed by a report, which would be standard practice for such an important reform.

Pirate Party Australia was calling for a, now possibly useless, non-partisan royal commission to consider different approaches that would be fair (to the voters, not the status quo). I would like to think that one solution that could have come out of that would have been this: Allow people to specify their own party preferences, just like in the current reform, but for any unspecified preferences, follow the preferences of the party in the voter's first preference.

For example, if party A had a GVT of A, B, C, D, E, F, and a voter voted A, F, D, then that would be translated into A, F, D, B, C, E.

This slight tweak to the system would have been the best of all worlds: Voters would be free to specify their own preferences, without too much effort and without relying on backroom party deals, parties could have worked with like-minded parties to ensure that votes aren't exhausted, and thereby wasted, and most of the power to exploit GVTs would have been removed.

Maybe this idea can be revisited after the upcoming election, but with all those independent voices set to be wiped out and a resulting, further entrenchment of power upon us, I'm not holding my breath.